Election 2019: Greens swamp inner north polling booths in city of sharp divides

The Greens blitzed the inner north, home to nine of their top 10 booths. The party polled higher than Labor in the City and Dickson College booths, bordering Hackett, Downer and Ainslie. This booth was the Greens' best, at 38 per cent.

The Liberals' stronghold is the inner south, and deeper in Tuggeranong, where the Greens do poorly - although even here, the Greens vote is at the national average, about 10 per cent. The Liberals also do well in Gungahlin, home to six of the party's top 10 polling booths. Labor is happiest in Belconnen, a result that sits comfortably with the narrative of Labor as the workers' party.

If the inner north loves the Greens, not so the Liberals, whose vote plunged to 15 per cent in Downer and Ainslie.

The Gungahlin results were mixed, a result Gungahlin Community Council president Peter Elford said probably partly reflected demographics. The strong support for the Liberals in Nicholls and Forde made sense given those were the suburbs where land was sold in bigger blocks with more demanding requirements for houses built. Forde borders the Mulligans Flat Nature Reserve; Nicholls has the Gold Creek golf course.

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Gordon and Conder were among the Liberals' strongest booths, reflected in comments from voters interviewed by The Canberra Times in the Lanyon marketplace on Tuesday. But David Smith, the Labor candidate elected in the seat, said he had held a dozen stalls at the shopping centre and had not detected anti-Labor sentiment.

"When you're on the doors and when you're on the shopping centre stalls people are pretty civil," he said.

He believed the scare campaign against Labor's tax plan had an impact, including the false messages about a death tax which people had believed.

Greens candidate Tim Hollo put the booth numbers down to campaigning. "We did the bulk of our campaign across the entirety of the inner north, lower Belconnen, Curtin and Lyons, and a bit in Narrabundah and Kingston, and that's where we've seen the swings and our best results so that's for me the clearest explanation."

A number of people appeared to be voting "technically" to unseat Labor - voting 1 Liberal and 2 Green, he said. The Liberals' decision to preference the Greens ahead of Labor saw Adam Bandt secure his Melbourne seat in 2010 and could have had the same effect here. But Mr Hollo said voting had become so polarised since then that it was hard to imagine the Liberals making the same pragmatic choice now.

"We're now the fifth greenest seat in the country and the inner north is absolutely one of the greenest parts of the country. And what goes along with that is that the Liberals are a minor party in the inner north. Which makes the next territory election very interesting indeed."